Dog Bites Man is about as black as a comedy can get. Sadistic as it is disturbingly hilarious, Dog Bites Man uses the documentary style to look into the spectacle of film violence. Debord says the spectacle is not added to the real world, but “it’s the very heart of society’s unreal reality.” Dog Bites Man attacks this idea a lot, clearly being false but the way it's presented gives it more “truth” than if it was shot for a different type of genre like a horror or a comedy. The reason this is so horrifying is because, like the title says, it could happen in your neighborhood. Dog Bites Man also has a very clear economic stance. It might seem unimportant, like early in the film Ben rants about the poor aesthetic choices of the low-income housing. However, this calls back to Debord, Ben has been isolated and broken down. Spectacle is the only way he can communicate.
The one scene that stood out to me as direct commentary on media was when Ben murders a married couple, chases down their son and smothers him with a pillow. This scene is brutal and disgusting, but Ben’s commentary about the subject pushes it beyond those two and turns it into a hilarious commentary on the bad reaction media will get when it kills children. You can’t kill kids, you can’t profit from it. But when our filmmaker asks him how many kids he’s killed, he non-chalantly reveals that this could be his fifth in a couple of years. Dog Bites Man is more than just a exploration of a serial killer, it’s a pitch black satire of our obsession with serial killers.
The Eternal Flame takes a look at spectacle from another angle. Over a decade after John F. Kennedy is killed, Ant Farm & T.R. Uthco set out to reenact November 22nd, 1963. This idea is slowly parsed out to you, in the beginning when the awful JFK impersonator gives a speech, no indication that The Eternal Frame is in on the joke until later when in a mock Oval Office, JFK-lite is grilled with questions and improvs his way through them hilariously. We realize that we’re watching the a movie about the assassination be made. But to what end? The filmmakers themselves don’t know. When reviewing and laughing at the footage after shooting on a soundstage with a green screen, our faux-JFK claims “This is terrible!” and has a big laugh.
The Eternal Flame doesn't get truly interesting until they set out to recreate the assassination where it actually took place in Dallas. When they hit the streets, stand-bys and watcher-ons love the spectacle. When you assume people would think it is a strange, tasteless act, the people actually love it. The people film it and eagerly talk to the documentarians camera about the event and how it made them feel. The film juxtaposes one woman crying with one woman getting overly excited when faux-JFK’s brains fly all over the car. The spectacle of death excites them. They take the spectacle one step further when they play the assassination film in a theater. Most movie-goers love it, saying it’s disturbing yet artful. The film ends with a man who says he just saw a lot of “phoniness”, he’s right, but he might be missing the point.
I would be interesting if you could have unpacked Debord's statement "society’s unreal reality" a bit more...that's a complex paradoxical statement. Can you point to specific images in these films that evoke the social unreal reality? In general this response could use more attention to the details of the images. Can you use one example from each project, one image from each that reinforces what Debord calls society's unreal real? You need to stick close to the technical aspects of each rather than give an overview of the project.
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